President Donald Trump launched into a wild rant about windmills Sunday, repeating a grab bag of misinformed claims about his least favorite energy source.
Trump began stacking up supposed U.S. advantages over Europe during a sit-down with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, culminating in a bizarre diatribe against windmills.
“And the other thing I say to Europe: We will will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us,” Trump said. “They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains—I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains.”
“Beautiful areas in the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place. It’s a horrible thing,” he added.
He also lamented spotting windmills “on the horizon” from his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, where Sunday’s meeting took place.
A longtime critic of the renewable energy source, Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term that paused all federal wind permits.
“The whole thing is a con job,” he continued, before revisiting one of his favorite theories—that the noise from offshore windmills are killing whales.
“It’s driving [whales] loco, it’s driving them crazy,” the 79-year-old president said, citing rising whale fatalities in Massachusetts, which some have speculated could be linked to newly built wind farms.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), states that, “at this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths. There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
While Trump declared, “Windmills will not come—it’s not going to happen in the United States,” there are at least 70,800 turbines across the country, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
In fact, wind power is the largest renewable energy source in the U.S., making up more than 10 percent of total electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
During his rant, Trump claimed that windmills start to “rust and rot in eight years. You can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them. They won’t let you bury the propellers.”
It’s true that windmills’ fiberglass blades are difficult to recycle and often end up in the landfill. But the Department of Energy estimates their overall service life at around 30 years. And turbines are 90 percent recyclable, according to CNN.
Trump, a climate change skeptic, has repeatedly attacked renewable energy while backing the fossil fuel industry—a stance underscored by his signature chant, “drill, baby, drill.”
The Trump administration is currently seeking to reverse a 2009 Environmental Protection Agency finding that allows fossil fuel pollution to be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
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